Overview of the ISC Event Bibliography


As of May 2023, the ISC Event Bibliography includes scientific articles that were published since the beginning of last century and related to seismic events that occurred since 1904 (Fig. 1).

We are working on extending the completeness of the Event Bibliography as far as the past and recent instrumentally recorded events are concerned. We are also updating the Event Bibliography on a monthly basis as soon as the new publications become available.

Figure 1. Annual number of publications (top) linked to seismic events, annual number of events (middle) and the distribution of the number of papers related to each seismic event (bottom); there is an on-going effort to fill the gap in the late 1960s and early 1970s as well as in the first part of the 20th century.

The majority of seismic events are described in just one or two scientific publications, yet a few events have attracted a large number of articles. A good recent example is the Tohoku earthquake of March 11, 2011 that is described in over 1900 articles.

Table 1 shows the first twenty authors with the largest number of event-oriented articles included in the ISC Event Bibliography. Please note that this number does not include all articles written by each author and by no means is intended to be viewed as an author ranking.

Authors are encouraged to check for missing publications or associations to other events and report such instances using Submit Your Article or Contact Us.

As of May 2023, the Event Bibliography database contains over 29,000 references from nearly 500 titles. Table 2 lists the first twenty journals containing the largest number of articles included in the ISC Event Bibliography.

AuthorN(papers)
Kanamori,H.
336
Lay,T.
181
Xu,C.
172
Li,Y.
167
Satake,K.
165
Zhang,Y.
148
Liu,J.
145
Okal,E.A.
134
Bürgmann,R.
133
Li,Z.
132
Wang,Y.
128
Singh,S.K.
111
Xu,X.
111
Zhang,J.
106
Liu,Y.
103
Hayakawa,M.
101
Hasegawa,A.
101
Sato,T.
99
Wyss,M.
99
Chen,X.
99
Table 1. List of the first twenty authors with the largest number of event-oriented articles included in the ISC Event Bibliography. This number does not include all articles written by each author and by no means is intended to be viewed as an author ranking.
JournalN(papers)
Bull. seism. Soc. Am.
2893
J. geophys. Res.
1866
Geophys. Res. Lett.
1553
Geophys. J. Int.
1154
Seismol. Res. Lett.
1036
Tectonophysics
903
J. Phys. Earth/Earth Planets Space
885
Pure appl. Geophys.
810
Earthq. Spectra
560
Chinese J. Geophys.
460
Bull. Earthq. Res. Inst. Tokyo Univ.
451
Zisin
400
Natural Hazards
389
Annls Geophys.
342
Nature
337
Earth planet. Sci. Lett.
337
Phys. Earth planet. Interiors
322
J. Seismol.
303
Acta seism. sin.
290
Bull. Earthquake Eng.
271
Table 2. List of the first twenty journals with more articles in the ISC Event Bibliography.

Figure 2 shows the spatial distribution of seismic events in the ISC Event Bibliography and the list of the top 50 events by number of associated publications. Unsurprisingly, most of these events occurred in Japan, California, Europe and Central America. For ease of use, we have adopted event codes selected to resemble the event names most commonly used in the literature.

Figure 2. The map of the ISC seismic events color-coded by the number of associated scientific publications (top) and list of the top 50 earthquakes with the largest number of associated publications.